yet another blog

Amazes me sometimes just how much I don’t know. Occasionally it’d be nice just to know something… anything in fact.

Case in point… given my Pagan predilection you’d think that I’d know a bit about nature, and wildlife, and be able to - for example - differentiate and name various species of plants, trees and stuff.

Wouldn’t you?

Wrong!

I can just about manage to identify the really common stuff like poppies, daffodils, oak trees, willow trees and… um… maybe holly trees.
Shameful, isn’t it? But I seem to manage all right normally - until suddenly I encounter something where I really do wish I weren’t quite so ignorant.

Wednesday last (23rd May) a couple of friends and I were walking along Cardington Road in Bedford, passing this really long line of trees, bushes, shrubs and stuff.
Friend A draws our attention to the fact that lots of the flora are festooned with cobweb-type cocoons or something. Far more in fact than she’s ever seen before in any one place.

Now whilst I might not be able to name the various species of plant life I am a relatively observant sort of person, and I have to say I cannot recollect ever having seen such a profusion of these cocoon-type things at one time ever before in my life. Nor am I particularly young. Nor am I a life-long city-dweller.The web structures appear to be confined to just one species of tree along a hedgerow some few hundred yards in length. But the trees that are affected are literally covered in them.


First impressions (on all our parts) were that they’re cobwebs and, from the multitude of little “speckly” type things (eggs?) inside them we initially thought they were spider webs.
Nasty! If that’s the case it means that before too long that particular area of the town’s gonna be infested with the little beasties.But then we came across some that clearly contained caterpillar-type creatures. Friend B flicks one of the “cocoons” with his finger and the inhabitants start wriggling around - testimony to their being alive. So I later began to speculate that maybe these are cocoons of butterflies/moths/dragonflies - I dunno. And this is where I’m made painfully aware of my own ignorance.

However, all ignorance aside, the sheer profusion of them strikes me as being remarkable. Indeed, quite unusual. I wonder whether this is an effect of the change in climate we’re so obviously experiencing.I’d also dearly love to know what the hell this stuff is!If you want to see all the photos we took of them check out my Flickr Photo Album.